


Blast off!

by BaileyBelle



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Geeky, I hope this isn't too technical but I'm such a rocket nerd!, desert beauty, rocket scientists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 03:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9367034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaileyBelle/pseuds/BaileyBelle
Summary: Ella Lopez attends an amateur rocketry launch in the Blackrock Desert, Nevada.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Where was Ella Lopez during Lucifer 2x11? Her actor mentioned [Ella was at NASA space camp](https://twitter.com/Aimee_Garcia/status/821191873549078528), but I think amateur rocket launches are a lot more fun. This one's for you, Aimee Garcia!

Ella surveyed the loose collection of tents, SUVs, and motor homes huddled against the Blackrock desert's dusty wind.

"So, why do they call this event BALLS?"

The bespeckled nerd walking beside Ella was taken aback. "Uhhh..."

"I mean is it some kinda macho brogrammer thing?"

The lanky man shook his head. "No, I think they call it BALLS because one of the founders of the event tried to launch a bowling ball with a rocket motor."

"Really? Sweet!" Ella pumped her fist, then looked at him. "It didn't fall on anyone's head, right?"

"No. We're very careful about range safety at our amateur rocket launches. Everyone is at least 100 feet from the launch sites, and the ground crews transmit over FM before they launch." Ella listened to the general chatter coming out of a nearby car radio and grinned, excited.

"So, like, do the rockets ever go rogue? Do you ever lose them in the desert?" Ella stared over the flat, cracked playa. The surrounding mountains were miles away.

"We did have a rocket spin out of control and tear itself to shreds. The fins weren't on straight." The man patiently tried to keep up with Ella's excited questions. "We try not to launch if there's heavy winds, since rockets can drift quite a ways if the main chute comes out too far away from the ground."

Ella lifted up the binoculars around her neck. "I'm totally down for being on the recovery team to find the rocket."

The nerd grinned. "Great! We'll pair you up with someone with a HAM radio license and we'll transmit the GPS coordinates we get from the rocket's wireless telemetry."

Ella spotted a huge airframe on sawhorses, and ran up to the geeks around it. "Ohmygod, I'm going to see a rocket launch!"

* * *

"I don't know if we can launch tomorrow." The leader of the group ran a hand over his nearly bald head. "It's 9pm, and the flight computer team is still working on the sensor fusion code."

Ella looked up from the custom-built rocket computer she was examining. "Do you always put off making rocket software until the last minute?"

"Hah! With this group, yes. Last year we were working on the code until an hour before launch. In the snow. With mittens on."

"Dude, you guys are hard-core!"

The leader shook his head. "Not nearly as hard core as the amateur rocket group that came from Britain to launch. They brought an experimental liquid-hybid motor, and it ruptured. Spewed liquid oxygen everywhere."

Ella's mouth was open. "Holy crap. So people aren't just into making custom rocket electronics and software, they make custom motors too?"

The man shrugged. "Most groups you'll see at BALLS focus on making their own airframe or experimental motors. Our group is one of the few that makes custom hardware and software. Most people just buy an off-the-shelf flight computer." He gestured out to the range, where a group of people were hooting and cheering. "I think the software team's going to be busy for a couple hours, so why don't you join the motor team?"

"Sure!" Ella walked over, using her headlamp to make sure she didn't trip over anything in the dark.

"Hey guys! Whatcha up to?"

One of the many shadowy figures raised a bottle in her direction. "Hi stranger! We were just going to test out our hybrid motor test stand. It's not a full rocket motor, but we're testing a GOX-paraffin hybid motor."

"Oh, gaseous oxygen and paraffin wax? Gotcha."

"Are you part of another rocket club?"

"Nah, I just deal with identifying a lot of mystery chemicals in my job at the LAPD crime lab."

"Hah! Well, since you're a chemistry nerd, I'm sure you'll love how we're going to test this motor."

"How?" Ella bent down to examine the motor with her head lamp. It was pretty massive, about 5" in dimeter and 3' long, with ground supports that were three times as long as the motor.

"Well, see, paraffin wax is basically fuel that burns in combination with the gaseous oxygen. But any solid fuel will do for this test, so we decided to use animal fat."

Ella did a double-take, almost blinding him with her headlamp. "Animal fat?"

The man giggled, and held something out in his hands.

"A sausage?!" Ella exclaimed, reaching out to grab it. _Yep, it's a cured deli sausage. Generic cheap brand with a high fat content._ "You're going to use a sausage as rocket motor fuel?!? You guys are crazy!"

The group laughed, and the motor guy took the sausage back. "Wanna watch?"

Ella jumped up. "Do I ever!"

The group stood far away, several people filming. "Stand by for experimental motor fire," the motor lead said into his family radio. "In 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Fire!"

The motor was silent for a second, and then its flame roared to life for a brief moment before sputtering wildly, almost going out, and then giving one final long blaze of glory.

The crowd erupted in cheers, and one person cautiously approached. "Oh shit, that reeks!"

Another person approached to check the burn patterns and burst out laughing. "There's charred meat all over the desert."

Ella doubled over laughing. She stayed to chat with the group as they fired their next test fuel: paraffin melted down from patchouli-scented candles.

* * *

Ella was getting her sleeping bag laid out in her tent when the friend that invited her to the launch stopped by. "Hey, rocket girl! How's it going?"

"Well, I applied patches to the flight computer kernel to work around the interrupt storm they were seeing." Ella nodded, but she only had a rough idea how the software her friend wrote talked to the hardware sensors. "It's up to the rest of the software team to finish the code to deploy the parachutes."

"Right, because if you deploy the parachutes too soon, the rocket drifts on the wind."

"And too late, and the rocket crashes into the ground." Her friend sighed. "I suspect they're going to be up all night. So I was wondering if you wanted to check out the local tourist attraction with me."

"What's that?"

"There's a hot spring about four miles away. We can bike over there."

"Sweet! I'm down. Let's go!"

"Ok, just use your headlamp to watch out for sand snakes."

Ella paused. "Whoa, whoa. Time out. I thought the Blackrock desert was too dry for animals."

"I'm just teasing you." Her friend elbowed her, and then shined her head lamp into the desert. "See that big long lump of sand?"

Ella strained her eyes and saw the twenty-foot long curve, about six inches high. "Yeah, I see it."

"The wind blows the sand into these long curvy bumps. People call them sand snakes. They make for a heck of a speed bump on a bicycle, so use your head lamp."

An hour later, they were relaxing in scalding water, watching the Milky Way rise over the desert sky. Ella had never seen the massive purple clouds, the individual seas of stars, as clearly as she did here, away from any city lights. "This place. It's so foreign and beautiful." Her friend nodded. "When I stepped out of my car and the dust died down, the desert was so flat and vast and dry and cracked. I felt like I was stepping out onto the moon."

"There's something about this place that strips you down to your very core, your essence. I guess that's why the Burning Man folks use it."

"Hey, thanks for convincing me to come."

"You're welcome. I'm just glad to have another woman here."

"Do those dudes give you trouble? I'll beat 'em up for you."

"Nah, the guys in my group are respectful. It's just all they talk about is tech stuff. It's nice to be able to talk about other things some times. So, how are you settling into L.A.?"

They chatted for another hour before biking back to camp.

* * *

"Launch tower is clear!" The ground crew's voice rang out over the radio, going through the final launch checklist. "Video is streaming. GPS is locked. We're getting sensor readings from the rocket. Recovery team A, are you ready?"

"In place to the south," the ham radio operator relayed.

Ella was so freaking tired, but she was also wired with excitement as she waited for the team's rocket launch. Most of the morning had been spent soaking in the techie gear at ground control, from the table full of laptops and radios, to the t-shirts with the words "ground crew" on the back and even the meticulous labels on the giant red tool box.

People were camped out in folding chairs, their handheld or shoulder mounded radios tuned into the group's frequency. Someone with a generator attached to their motor home had made the entire software team coffee. They looked like they needed it, since most of them had been up all night. One poor sap's job was to hold a shoulder-mounted antenna to capture signals from the rocket as it launched. The launch had been delayed for a half an hour, but he held up the 15 pound mount like a champ.

Now Ella was situated a kilometer south of the line of tents, anxiously awaiting the final count down. It was their job to track the rocket with binoculars, and follow it by car if it drifted too far away.

"Turning on the tower siren." The harsh sound rang across the hushed camp. "T-30 seconds. 29... 28..."

Everyone's attention was focused on the 20 foot rocket sitting on the launch pad.

"5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Ignition."

The rocket was silent on the pad for a brief second, long enough for Ella to wonder if something was wrong. Then she saw smoke curl out the bottom of the rocket, and suddenly it was bursting into the air, the explosive jet of flame shooting it into the cloudless blue sky. Several people whooped with joy, but the ground crew was intent on the rocket. "Data stream is good! Let's try the roll control."

Ella tracked the rocket with her binoculars, a tiny shining glint of metal the only hint as it traveled further into the atmosphere. She held her breath, waiting for the parachute to deploy, anxiously hoping the rocket wouldn't crash. The radio crackled. "Rocket is decelerating. Reaching apogee." Ella's eyes were glued to the rocket as it slowed. "Flight computer deploying drogue chute." Ella saw a puff of smoke, and a spot of color that might be a parachute. "Acceleration staying low. I think we're good, folks!"

Ella's recovery teammate nudged her. "Looks like the wind is making it drift our way." He jogged over to his SUV. "Come on partner, let's catch a rocket!" Ella ran after him, and jumped into the passenger seat.

"Ground control is giving us GPS coordinates," Ella relayed, listening to the radio as her partner drove.

"Good. Plug them into this," they said, handing over a hand-held GPS unit. Ella yelped as the seat beneath her bucked as they raced over one of those sand snakes.

"A little more to the left." Ella stared at the screen. "Yeah, that's good." She ducked down, trying to spot the rocket out the windshield, then leaned out the open window. "There! There! I see it!"

"Haha!" Her partner spun the wheel, turning the car towards the oncoming spot in the sky. "Now, we can't get too close to it just yet. The main chute doesn't deploy until it's 500 feet from the ground, and if it fails, well, we don't want to be underneath it."

"So it fell 20,000 feet on the drogue chute alone?"

"Yep. Keep your eye on it, in case it changes direction."

Ella was relieved when ground control announced the main chute had deployed. They stepped out of the car and watched as the rocket drifted down the last thirty feet. It landed with a slight bump on the hard-packed desert floor. They ran over, and Ella was happy to see this part of the rocket was intact.

"...with third party traffic." Her partner finished talking into his radio, and then looked at Ella. "Would you like the honor of calling this in?"

Ella bit her lip. "Yes!" She took the radio and GPS from him, read the coordinates, took a deep breath, and pushed the talk button. "Flight director, the rocket has landed. I repeat, the rocket has landed."

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, all of this has happened at one rocket launch or another. Including the sausage, bowling ball, and hot springs.


End file.
